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Things to do this week in NYC Sep 8-Sep 15: Museums

Some of the world's most impressive museums and exhibits are in New York?including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and (of course) the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the great things to do in NYC is to visit these spectacular collections. Whether you're a native New Yorker or here on vacation, NYC's museums have something new and interesting to offer everybody! Here is a list of what's going on this week at museums throughout New York City.

New Practices New York, a biennial competition since 2006, serves as the preeminent platform in New York City to recognize and promote new and innovative architecture and design firms. The juried portfolio competition is sponsored by the New Practices Committee of the AIA New York Chapter and honors firms that have utilized unique and innovative strategies, both for the projects they undertake and for the practices they have established.
Seven promising and pioneering new architecture and design firms working in New York were chosen as the New Practices New York 2012 competition winners. To qualify for the competition, practices had to be founded since 2006 and be located within the five boroughs of New York City. This is the second year that the New Practices New York competition has been open to multidisciplinary firms, widening the field of entrants to designers and young professionals in the process of becoming licensed architects. The distinguished panel of jurors selected the competition's winners from fifty-one entries.
The New Practices New York 2012 competition winners are: ABRUZZO BODZIAK ARCHITECTS; Christian Wassmann; formlessfinder; HOLLER architecture; The Living; MARC FORNES & THEVERYMANY; and SLO Architecture.

Since the beginning of art and in every medium, depicting the human body has been among the artist's greatest challenges and supreme achievements, as can so easily be seen by Museum visitors walking through the galleries of Greek and Roman statuary, African and Oceanic art, Old Master paintings, or Indian sculpture. Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have also triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity -- when a real person stood naked before the camera -- rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail.
In the medium's early days -- particularly in France, where Victorian notions of propriety held less sway than in England and America, and where life drawing was a central part of artistic training -- photographs proved to be a cheap and easy substitute for the live model. While serving painters and sculptors, many nineteenth-century photographic nudes were also intended as works of art in their own right. Still others bore the title "artist's study" merely to evade government censors and legitimize images that were, in fact, more likely intended to stir a gentleman's loins than to enhance his aesthetic endeavors. Outside the realms of art and erotica, photographic nudes were made to aid the study of anatomy, movement, forensics, and ethnography.
In twentieth-century art, the body became a vehicle for surreal and modernist manipulation and for intimate odes to beauty or poems to a muse. Beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, nudity and its representation took on new meanings -- as declarations of freedom from societal strictures, as assertions of individual identity, as explorations of sexuality and gender roles, and as responses to AIDS.
Naked before the Camera surveys the history of this subject and examines some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its expression.

"Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently" is a multipart project that explores the idea of sexual and gender "difference" after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics. Through an exhibition, series of events, and an opening symposium, the project seeks to invigorate discussion around a queer "We" that looks beyond tolerance or assimilation toward a concept of equality that provides for greater personal freedom. The project draws from Motta's evolving database documentary wewhofeeldifferently.info, which proposes "difference" as a profound mode of possibility for both solidarity and self-determination.

Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) is a New York–based artist whose work in photography, film, video, sound, and performance examines the nexus between politics, history, speech, and desire. This exhibition, conceived by Hayes for the Whitney's third floor galleries, brings together existing pieces and newly commissioned works, all of which articulate forms of what Hayes calls "speech acts." The works are presented within an environment designed by Hayes in collaboration with artist Andrea Geyer.

As part of its summer program of sculpture exhibitions in the Gilbert Court, the Morgan will present three major sculptures by renowned abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly. Spare and elegant, Kelly's free-standing totemic forms -- one in bronze, the other two in mahogany and redwood -- exude the same quiet and spectacular beauty as his better-known, brightly colored paintings. The exhibition will also include a group of models and drawings that reveal the artist's process.

The fifth exhibition in the Raw/Cooked series presents the work of Sunset Park-based artist Ulrike Muller. With the goal of starting a conversation on the lesbian feminist movement and examining the visibility of queer bodies within mainstream culture and the Museum, Muller orchestrated a collaborative drawing project based on the inventory list of the feminist T-shirt collection at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She distributed textual T-shirt descriptions to feminists, queer artists, and other interested New Yorkers, and asked that they translate these texts into new images. Her exhibition includes one hundred drawings from this project. Additionally, she used symbolic lesbian, feminist, and queer terms from the inventory as search criteria to mine the Museum's online collection. Through the display of approximately one hundred of the collaborative drawings and nearly twenty-five Museum collection objects in the Luce Center for American Art's Elevator Lobby and elsewhere in the Museum, Muller creates a visual dialogue among contemporary queer culture, the Museum, and the history of feminist activism.
Muller graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She was recommended for Raw/Cooked by advisory board member Amy Sillman.
Raw/Cooked is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Complimenting the Noguchi Museum's permanently installed lower levels, selections from the Museum's Collections, including examples of Noguchi's steel sculptures and a number of collaborative stage sets, are now on view in the upstairs galleries.

This exhibition looks at the transitional period in hand press bookmaking through 14 Bibles printed between 1455 and 1525. Early printed books initially looked to manuscripts to inform page design, typeface, binding, and decorative embellishment. As the era progressed, printers and other craftsmen involved in the production of a printed volume began to experiment with the possibilities handpress production afforded to create innovative, elegant books. Focusing on Gothic bindings and the structure of a selection of books drawn from the Rare Bible Collection @ MOBIA, conservator Clare Manias explores regional differences in the volumes' styles, production, and form illustrating that printed books have stories to tell and are much more than what's between the covers.

Illustrating one of the most celebrated Renaissance themes, Bartolo di Fredi's (c. 1330-1410) Adoration of the Magi will be reunited in this groundbreaking exhibition. The three known surviving panels of this Siense master's unrivaled altarpiece are considered by many to be among Bartolo's finest works. Composed of a monumental central panel depicting a tender visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, his Crucifixion and the mourning it brings, "Adoration of the Magi" by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed permits an in-depth study of this oft-depicted Christian narrative.
The three altarpiece panels will be on loan from the Pinacoteca of Siena, the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg Germany, and the University of Virginia Art Museum, the first venue for the exhibition. At the Museum of Biblical Art, Bartolo's altarpiece will be displayed alongside a magnificent version of the Adoration of the Magi which he completed as a standalone work in c. 1390, on loan from The Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as Bartolo's depiction of the Adoration of the Shepherds dating to c. 1374, on loan from The Cloisters. Both paintings will enhance the detailed examination of this master's grand altarpiece.

Making American Taste features fifty-five works from the New-York Historical Society's collection that cast new light on both the history of American art and the formation of American cultural ideals during a crucial period from the 1830s to the late 1860s. By integrating history, literary and religious subjects with now better-known examples of rural and domestic genre, the exhibition explores the broad range of styles and narrative themes that appealed to nineteenth-century Americans seeking cultural refinement.

In December 2010, The Drawing Center launched ReDraw: The Capital Plan for 35 Wooster Street with the purchase of a 2,000-square-foot unit on the second floor of 35 Wooster Street, which will replace its leased space at 40 Wooster Street.
Plans for the new space have been designed by Claire Weisz and WXY Architecture + Urban Design, an internationally-recognized New York–based firm. ReDraw's architectural program addresses specific exhibition, educational, and operational requirements, reinforcing The Drawing Center's mission to present the highest-quality cultural programming in galleries proportioned to facilitate a meaningful viewer experience—attributes that have made the institution one of the most respected, beloved, and distinctive non-profits in New York City.
The building project will connect the existing ground floor space to the newly-acquired second floor space and the lower level of the building. A new bookstore and a sky-lit Drawing Room gallery will join the existing visitor services desk and Main Gallery on the ground floor level. Offices and administrative spaces will move to the second floor, and the renovated lower level will accommodate a new education room, a Viewing Program meeting room, and the experimental Lab gallery, which will feature an audio and video media system for exhibitions and public programs. Integrating these spaces into one building will provide The Drawing Center with 50% more contiguous programmatic space.
The Drawing Center has suspended on-site programming as construction takes place.

On the occasion of Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, the Guggenheim presents a short program of film and video works carefully assembled by the artist. This unique program includes Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), Mark Leckey's acclaimed short film portraying British nightlife from fragments of found video footage; Pierre Huyghe's Blanche-Neige Lucie (1997), a short film capturing the struggle of Lucie Dolene, who sued Disney to regain possession of the copyright to her own voice in the French dubbed version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; as well as Blind Kind (1964), Johan van der Keuken's documentary about a school for blind children in Amsterdam.

This exhibition features key works in various media by Edouard Vuillard, the twentieth-century master whose unique blend of tradition and modernity evokes the refined and sophisticated society of his patrons, many of whom were Jewish.

The New-York Historical Society will present Stories in Sterling: Four Centuries of Silver in New York, an exhibition highlighting the histories of 150 notable examples of silver from its collection. Made across the span of four centuries, the objects in the exhibition tell a diversity of stories: many speak to individual accomplishment and family pride, while a few have unsettling ties or backgrounds. The silver, ranging from simple spoons to extravagant trophies, culled from a trove of over 3,000 objects, includes powerful eyewitness artifacts linked to significant moments in the history of New York and the United States.

Sir Winston Churchill's impact upon the twentieth century is difficult to overestimate. A master orator and writer, Churchill's use of spoken and written words will be explored in this exhibition that covers more than a half century of his life?from Victorian childhood letters to his parents, to Cold War correspondence with President Eisenhower, and featuring some of his most famous wartime oratory. Drawn from the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, the presentation uses drafts, speaking notes, personal and official correspondence, public statements, and recordings from some of his most compelling speeches and broadcasts as lenses to examine the main events in Churchill's life. Of particular focus will be Churchill's lifelong relationship with the United States, homeland of his Brooklyn-born mother, from first visit in 1895 to award of Honorary Citizenship in 1963; and the ways in which he used the written and spoken word to develop, complement and advance his political career.

Featuring some seventy masterpieces of drawings, books, maps, and letters from the Morgan's rich holdings, the exhibition Renaissance Venice: Drawings from the Morgan chronicles the artistic production of the city of Venice and its territories during the republic's Golden Age, the sixteenth century. The exhibition features striking examples by great masters of the period, including Paris Bordone, Vittore Carpaccio, Lorenzo Lotto, Jacopo Tintoretto, Titian, and Paolo Veronese.
Offering compelling insights into contemporary art, religion, and culture, Renaissance Venice addresses topics such as the portrait in Venetian art, Venice and the landscape tradition, religious and civic life, artistic innovations in printmaking and drawing, book publishing and cartography, and the role of foreign artists in the city. This is the first presentation and study of these drawings as a group and the first show in the United States on this theme.

SPACE-LIGHT-STRUCTURE: THE JEWELRY OF MARGARET DE PATTA is the first comprehensive retrospective of the life and work of Margaret De Patta (1903-1964), a pioneer in American studio jewelry whose modernist creations remain as fresh and vital today as when they were initially conceived in the mid-twentieth century.
Featuring De Patta's most spectacular brooches, pendants, and rings, Space, Light, Structure explores the major contributions of this groundbreaking San Francisco artist and sheds new light on her radical design philosophy.
In 1939, De Patta began her search for new techniques that would allow her to take advantage of the inherent refractory properties of transparent and semi-transparent crystals. Her innovative "opticuts" revolutionized contemporary jewelry by transforming stones into brilliant, transparent spatial objects that, to this day, remain unsurpassed in concept, form, and execution.
Growing out of her passion for modern architecture-and signaling a radical departure from the conventional perception of jewelry as mere body ornament- the compositions of her "wearable miniature sculptures" exhibit a dynamic equilibrium in which cantilevered, linear elements are counter-balanced against more compact, denser forms.
The exhibition also illuminates the critical influence of De Patta's mentor, L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, the renowned artist with whom she studied in 1941-42. The Constructivist concepts championed by this former Bauhaus master and co-founder of the Chicago Bauhaus are manifest in De Patta's manipulation of space and light as well as through her incorporation of kinetic elements, space-defining steel screens, "opticut" rutilated crystals, and "floating" tension-mounted stones. Several equilibrium studies and photograms by Moholy-Nagy will underscore the enduring formal strength and visual excitement of the jewelry De Patta produced following the tenets she absorbed from him. Important works by other leading international protagonists of Constructivism, including El Lissitzky Alexander Archipenko, and Gy�rgy Kepes, will also be included in order to contextualize De Patta and her work.
Drawn from important museum, gallery, and private collections in the United States and Canada, as well as from the De Patta Archives in California, the exhibition also presents never-before-shown examples of the artist's flatware, ceramics, and designs for interior spaces, in addition to travel diaries of her trips to Mexico, Japan, and the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Stories in Sterling: Four Centuries of Silver in New York, highlights the histories of 150 notable examples of silver from the New-York Historical Society's collection. Made across the span of four centuries, the objects in the exhibition tell a diversity of stories: many speak to individual accomplishment and family pride, while a few have unsettling ties or backgrounds. The silver, ranging from simple spoons to extravagant trophies, culled from a trove of over 3,000 objects, includes powerful eyewitness artifacts linked to significant moments in the history of New York and the United States.

Electricity -- a source of clean, efficient power and brilliant, reliable light -- epitomized the very spirit of modernism in the early 20th century. After decades of research and competitive experimentation following the development of the first arc lamps and incandescent filament bulbs in the mid-19th century, electricity began to transform every aspect of modern life. Electric light -- first in city streets and then in homes -- brought a revolutionary innovation to daily existence, literally redefining day and night. This installation features a dozen posters from MoMA's collection used in this period to promote electricity, which offered staggering possibilities for progress but was not universally welcomed. In creating graphics for industry leaders like AEG and Bosch, modern designers were inspired by the beauty of the bulb itself and the splendor of electric light, which are both rendered with exquisite power in Jacques Nathan-Garamond's poster of c. 1938, which pulsates in 2-D. The installation highlights a selection of Lester Beall's equally vibrant posters for the Rural Electrification Administration, which used bold, patriotic graphics to foster public awareness of the benefits of electricity in America's homes and farms during the Great Depression.

From the calling of Moses to the crossing of the Red Sea, the drama of the ancient Israelites' exodus from Egypt is presented in The Rylands Haggadah.
This is the third in a series of installations focusing on one masterwork of Hebrew manuscript illumination from a national or international collection. This spring, the featured work comes from the John Rylands University Library in Manchester, England. Each month, the Haggadah will be open to a different page, affording visitors the exceptional opportunity to follow the artist's telling of the Exodus story. Works of art from the Museum's own collection, made for Christian use but depicting the saga of the Hebrew people, will suggest the larger, medieval context of biblical storytelling in which the Haggadah was created.
The previous installations featured the Washington Haggadah (on view April 5-July 4, 2011) and Lisbon's Hebrew Bible (on view November 22, 2011-January 16, 2012).

This installation of Italian illuminations from the Robert Lehman Collection, featuring examples by leading masters from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, highlights the achievements of this art form and its close ties to painting during the Italian Renaissance. The majority of the parchment leaves and cuttings, decorated in jewel-toned palettes and gold, are initials that have been excised from choir books. Approaching the scale of small panel paintings, the Florentine and Sienese initials reflect the colossal size of these books, which enabled a large group of clergy to read the text and music at a distance. Two Northern Italian leaves, not created as part of manuscripts but as independent paintings on parchment, also blur the boundaries between the two art forms. In fact, nearly all of the illuminators represented worked in both media; paintings by three of them (Lorenzo Monaco, Sano di Pietro, and the Osservanza Master) are displayed nearby in the Lehman galleries, highlighting Robert Lehman's view of his miniatures as an extension of his paintings collection.

In conjunction with the Museum-wide summer exhibition "Ghosts in the Machine," the New Museum will present "Pictures from the Moon" in the Lobby Gallery, which will feature a focused selection of holograms from the 1960s to the present by several leading, contemporary artists. The 1960s ushered in new technologies and new frontiers for image production. The development of laser technology in 1962 enabled the creation of holograms that displayed three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional surface. Artists were drawn to holography, hailed as a medium of the future that turned space inside out, for its spatial, volumetric, and sequential qualities, and to the creative possibilities it offered in contrast to photography, film, and early video. "Pictures from the Moon"-its title inspired by photographs of earth taken by astronauts on the first mission to the moon that also expanded our way of seeing-celebrates an alternative history of virtually unknown images by artists experimenting on the edge of visual technology.
One of the earliest pioneers in the holographic medium is Bruce Nauman, whose holograms from the late 1960s furthered the physical manipulations and explorations of the body as a medium that he was conducting at the time. Nauman produced two sets of holograms between 1968 and 1969. The second set displays his body compressed, coerced, and contorted into the picture plane. "Pictures from the Moon" will include Nauman's Hologram H from the "Second Hologram Series: Full Figure Poses (A-J)" (1969), marking one of the first times this work has been shown in New York.
A surprising number of established artists soon followed with experimentations in holography that have continued over the last four decades. Artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Eric Orr, Ed Ruscha, and James Turrell have all made holographic works that draw on the medium's ability to replicate three-dimensionality and deep space to expand upon themes they so successfully mined in other formats. The haunting, domestic objects and sinister interiors that define Bourgeois's work appear wholly present in her untitled holograms from 1998. In Ed Ruscha's series of holograms produced the same year, the phrase "The End" floats at various depths in the picture plane, set against animated lines scratched into a celluloid surface, and offering a new twist on the interplay between text, landscape, and spatial representation for which Ruscha is known. Eric Orr and James Turrell, in whose works light and space function as artistic mediums, both created holograms that synthesize color, shape, illumination, and form. Turrell, who has made an extensive body of holographic work and who continues to work in the medium pushing it forward into challenging new realms, produced the largest and most recent hologram in the exhibition.
In this current age of techno-dependency, "Pictures from the Moon" offers a view of the persistent attempts by artists to wrest something more from technology than that for which it was invented. As advancements in 3-D technologies are demonstrated in new formats of television and film production, the enduring hologram continues to mesmerize by expanding the artistic and visual fields that lay before our eyes.

Well known for her use of dense patterns of polka dots and nets, as well as her intense, large-scale environments, Yayoi Kusama works in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance, and immersive installation. Born in Japan in 1929, Kusama came to the United States in 1957 and quickly found herself at the epicenter of the New York avant-garde. After achieving fame through groundbreaking exhibitions and art "happenings," she returned to her native country in 1973 and is now one of Japan's most prominent contemporary artists. This retrospective features works spanning Kusama's career.

This retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, will be the largest presentation outside of Italy of works by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) to date. Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s amidst a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, Boetti established himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera movement.
Organized chronologically, the exhibition will span Boetti's entire career beginning with his sculptural works, or objects as he preferred to call them, comprised of everyday materials including wood, cardboard, and aluminum. Brought together (many for the first time since Boetti's seminal exhibition at Galleria Christian Stein in Turin in 1967) and installed in a dense configuration inspired by the original clustered presentation, these early works convey the material experiments of the period as well as notions of measurement and chance that Boetti would play with and revise throughout his career. While Boetti is often chiefly affiliated with the Arte Povera moment, Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan will consider Boetti beyond these brief years. In 1969 Boetti began exploring notions of duality and multiplicity, order and disorder, travel and geography, and he initiated postal and map works imagining distant places. For the work Viaggi Postali, begun the summer of 1969, Boetti sent envelopes to friends, family, and fellow artists but used imaginary addresses, forwarding each returned envelope to yet another non-existent place. Boetti thus created imaginary journeys for the people he admired. In other conceptual, mail art-related works made throughout the 1970s, Boetti would use different stamps and arrange them in permutations on the envelopes to compose his art, and send postcards picturing a monument in his hometown from places around the world. The exhibition brings together these and other works related to travel, geography, and mapping, many of which relate to his extensive travels to Afghanistan, where he operated the One Hotel (archival material from which will be on view) from 1971 until the Soviet invasion in 1979. During this period, Boetti began working with local artisans to produce embroideries such as the Mappas (maps), Arazzi (word squares), and Tuttos (literally, "Everything"), important examples of which will be included in the galleries and the Marron Atrium.
An important aspect of Boetti's oeuvre is drawing, which runs as a constant throughout his work. A monumental Biro (ball point pen) drawing from 1973, spelling out the title "Mettere a mondo il mondo (Bringing the world into the world)" points to some of Boetti's ideas about art making that were fundamental to his practice: that the artist, rather than inventing, simply brings what already exists in the world into the work; and that everything in the world is potentially useful for the artist. This exhibition will celebrate the material diversity, conceptual complexity, and visual beauty of Boetti's work, bringing together his ideas about order and disorder, non-invention, and the way in which the work addresses the whole world, travel, and time, proving him to be one of the most important and influential international artists of his generation.

Opening at the New Museum in July 2012, "Ghosts in the Machine" surveys the constantly shifting relationship between humans, machines, and art. Occupying the Museum's three main galleries, the exhibition examines artists' embrace of and fascination with technology, as well as their prescient awareness of the ways in which technology can transform subjective experiences.
International in scope, the exhibition spans more than fifty years and incorporates works by contemporary artists. The works assembled trace the complex historical passage from the mechanical to the optical to the virtual, looking at the ways in which humans have projected anthropomorphic behaviors onto machines that have become progressively more human. In place of a traditional, chronological approach, "Ghosts in the Machine" is conceived as an encyclopedic cabinet of wonders: bringing together an array of artworks and non-art objects to create an unsystematic archive of man�s attempt to reconcile the organic and the mechanical.
The installation at the New Museum will include artists, writers, and visionaries whose works have explored the fears and aspirations generated by the technology of their time. From Jacob Mohr's influencing machines to Emery Blagdon's healing constructions, the exhibition brings together improvised technologies charged with magical powers. Historical works by Hans Haacke, Robert Breer, Otto Piene, and Gianni Colombo, amongst others, will be displayed alongside reconstructions of lost works and realizations of dystopian mechanical devices invented by figures like Franz Kafka. "Ghosts in the Machine" also takes its cue from a number of exhibitions designed by artists that incorporated modern technology to reimagine the role of art in contemporary societies, including Richard Hamilton's "Man, Machine and Motion" (1955). Exploring the integration of art and science, "Ghosts in the Machine" also tries to identify an art historical lineage of works preoccupied with the way we imagine and experience the future, delineating an archeology of visionary dreams that have never become a reality.
Many of the artists in the show take a scientific approach to investigating the realm of the invisible, dismantling the mechanics of vision in order to conceive new possibilities for seeing. Central to the exhibition is a re-examination of Op Art and perceptual abstraction, with a particular focus on the work of painters Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuskiewicz, and Julian Stanczak, amongst others. Op Art was unique in the way it internalized technology and captured both the ecstatic and threatening qualities it posed to the human body. Furthermore, the exhibition will include a number of kinetic and "programmed" artworks as well as expanded cinema pieces, which amplify the radical effects of technology on vision. A section of the exhibition will present a selection of experimental films and videos realized with early computer technology. One highlight of the installation will be a reconstruction of Stan VanDerBeek's Movie-Drome (1963-65), an immersive cinematic environment where the viewer is bathed in a constant stream of moving images, anticipating the fusion of information and the body, typical of the digital era.
As technology has accelerated and proliferated dramatically over the past twenty years, artists have continued to monitor its impact. A number of contemporary artists, including Mark Leckey, Henrik Olesen, and Christopher Williams, will be represented in the exhibition. These recent works, while reflecting technological changes, also display a fascination with earlier machines and the types of knowledge and experiences that are lost as we move from one era to the next, constantly dreaming up new futures that will never arrive.

This comprehensive mid-career survey features over 70 color photographs and five video installations by the Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra. Rineke Dijkstra is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Hollywood directors John Ford, George Stevens, and Samuel Fuller entertained audiences with American cinema classics like The Grapes of Wrath, Shane, and The Big Red One. But their most important contribution to history was their work in the U.S. Armed Forces and Secret Services, filming the realities of war and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Their documentation provides an essential visual record of WWII. Filming the Camps presents rare footage of the liberation of Dachau with detailed directors' notes, narratives describing burials at Falkenau, and the documentary produced as evidence at the Nuremberg trials, among other historic material. Now, for the first time in the U.S., this material is being made available to a general audience.

Josef Albers (1888-1976) is best known for his series of paintings, Homage to the Square, in which he endlessly explored color relationships within a similar format of concentric squares. Less well-known are the studies he made for these compositions. With approximately sixty oil sketches on paper, this exhibition will reveal a private side of Albers's work. These sketches were never exhibited in the artist's lifetime and have rarely been seen after his death.
On view will be early studies (1930s-early 1940s), studies for Albers's Adobe series, inspired by Mexican architecture (1940s-early 1950s), and studies for Homage to the Square (1950s-1970s). These vibrant sketches provide insights into the artist's working process and, in contrast with the austerity and strict geometry of the final paintings, are remarkable for their freedom and sensuality.
Works are drawn from the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany. The exhibition, which is traveling to multiple venues in Europe before coming to the Morgan (the only U.S. venue), is organized by the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich and the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop.

Approaching Abstraction is the second exhibition of a three-part series, titled Modernist Art from India, that examines art from post-independence and post-Partition India. Building on the explorations between abstraction and figuration begun in The Body Unbound, the exhibition distinguishes abstraction in modernist Indian art from abstraction in Euro-American modernism and shows the independent trajectory of abstraction in post-Independence India.

Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3/Contemporary Native North American Art from the Northeast and Southeast concludes a cycle of exhibitions organized over the past decade by the Museum of Arts and Design. Curated by Ellen Taubman and David McFadden, these exhibitions have presented a diverse panoply of new work by Native American, First Nations, Métís and Inuit artists from the continental United States, the Pacific rim, and Canada. Representing both established and emerging artists, the series has laid bare the new vitality and spirit of experimentation that has come to the forefront among the art practices of Native artists working today. All three Changing Hands exhibitions have focused on art that points toward the future, presenting works by contemporary artists who embrace and take inspiration from cultural traditions while also expressing contemporary creativity and innovation. They have sought to transcend ethnographic and anthropological interpretations, challenge preconceived notions and stereotypes of Indigenous art and artists, and ultimately to effect a reevaluation of present-day Native art in an international arena.

Capital of Capital: New York's Banks and the Creation of a Global Economy explores how the economic dynamo that is New York was made possible in great measure by its innovative and controversial banking sector. Tracing the trajectory of the city's banks from the founding of the Bank of New York by Alexander Hamilton in 1784 to their primacy in today's nation and world, the exhibition utilizes rare historical objects and images, including banking instruments, architectural renderings, and advertisements, to tell a fascinating saga of growth, innovation, and, at times, unintended consequences. In so doing, it also reveals how New York City's particular circumstances-geography, human capital, and political alignments-helped make finance a major component not only of Gotham's economy but also of its identity

Drawn from the Museum's deep holdings of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, and photographs, Signs & Symbols sheds new light on the development of American abstraction during the critical postwar period of the mid-1940s to the end of the 1950s. Many artists active in this period who are often overlooked -- Will Barnet, Forrest Bess, Charles Seliger, and Mark Tobey, among others -- developed abstract work that remains distinct from many of the concerns associated with the canonized Abstract Expressionists, including large-scale canvases and gestural brushwork. Instead, the exhibition presents a more nuanced narrative, focused on the figurative and calligraphic "signs and symbols" present in much of the highly controlled work from this period and included in this show. In many cases, this work drew inspiration from specifically American sources and sought to foster a national aesthetic distinct from European Surrealism and Cubism. These investigations formed an important foundation for a future generation of artists--including Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein--who later incorporated highly individualized systems of signs into their own work while embracing distinctly American subject matter.

This exhibition presents one of the first multimedia projections ever made: Oskar Fischinger's Raumlichtkunst (Space Light Art), a re-creation of his multiple-screen film events, first shown in Germany in 1926, and recently restored by the Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles. Radical in format, its display of abstract shapes and colors produces, according to Fischinger, "an intoxication by light from a thousand sources."

The Emerging New York Architects (ENYA) Committee of the AIA NY Chapter is proud to announce the winners of its fifth biennial design ideas competition, The Harlem Edge | Cultivating Connections. One hundred seventy-eight (178) teams and individuals registered for the competition and more than ninety-eight (98) entries from sixteen (16) countries were submitted for judging. The winning entries will be exhibited at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY, this July and be published in a competition catalog. In coordination with the exhibition, ENYA will be hosting a symposium to discuss design issues related to the winning entries and possibilities for the future development of the site and its neighboring community.
Congratulations to the winners:
ENYA Prize, $5000: Sym'bio'pia
Ting Chin and Yan Wang, Linearscape Architecture, New York, NY, USA
2nd Prize, $2500: The Hudson Exchange
Eliza Higgins, Cyrus Patell, Chris Starkey, and Andrea Vittadini, Brooklyn, NY, USA
3rd Prize, $1000: Harlem Harvest
Ryan Doyle, Guido Elgueta, and Tyler Caine, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Student Prize, $1000: Stairway to Harlem
Daniel Mowery, Student of Architecture, University of Virginia, USA
Honorable Mentions:
Continuum, by Nasiq Khan, and Scott Brandi, Bayside, NY, USA
Subaqueous Promenade, by Doyoung Oh, and Jaemin Ha, London, United Kingdom/Boston, MA, USA
New Marine Transfer Station, by Yashar Ghasemkhani, Arash Mesbah, and Pooneh Sadrimanesh, New York, NY, USA
Land Over Water Agro-Pavilion, by Michael C. Kilroy, and Jonathan Sampson, Students of Architecture, University of New Mexico, USA
Greenhouse Transformer, by Dongwoo Yim, and Rafael Luna, PRAUD, Boston, MA, USA

Artist Tomas Saraceno (born in Tucuman, Argentina, in 1973) will create a constellation of large, interconnected modules constructed with transparent and reflective materials for the Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. Visitors may enter and walk through these habitat-like, modular structures grouped in a nonlinear configuration. Over the past decade, Saraceno has established a practice of constructing habitable networks based upon complex geometries and interconnectivity that merge art, architecture, and science. The interdisciplinary project "Cloud Cities/Air Port City" is rooted in the artist's investigation of expanding the ways in which we inhabit and experience our environment.

New York City police have used horse-mounted officers since at least 1858, with the opening of Central Park. Since its formal organization in 1871, the Mounted Unit has evolved into one of the NYPD's most visible and elite police units. This exciting exhibit will explore their fascinating history and continuing day-to-day operations. Through artifacts that include saddles, harnesses and uniforms, paintings, video, and historic photographs, the exhibit will delve into the lives and work of the officers known by their nickname, "10-foot cops."

Reuniting the score and designs from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, this exhibition focuses on the opera's premiere performances in 1976. Visitors will enter a gallery awash in blue light, reminiscent of the opera's stage lighting, where they will encounter Glass's entire never-before-displayed autograph manuscript, as well as Wilson's storyboard, thirteen leaves encompassing 113 scene designs. Footage from the New York rehearsal, and 1976 productions in Paris, Brussels, and Venice will run continuously in the gallery; the documentary "Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera," about the 1984 production at BAM, will be screened in the Morgan's Gilder Lehrman Hall throughout the exhibition.

Type. Swipe. Search. Upload. Download. Post. Stream. These are the new verbs of desire. Our most intimate thoughts, fantasies, and urges are now transmitted via electronic devices to rapt audiences all over the world. These transmissions�from sexts to webcam masturbation feeds-are anonymous yet personal, individual yet collective, everywhere and nowhere, and they are contributing to the largest sexual record to date. In short, desire has gone viral. But what does this mean? And what does it reveal about us? This exhibition explores these very questions through a lens of digital experience by examining what we are searching for, how we do it and what we leave behind on these electronic devices. In piecing this together, we begin to expose staggering truths about who we are and how we interact in this ever-changing world of modern sexuality.
"As human behavior becomes more clickable than physical, we can-t help but wonder what this means for our most basic, biological impulse: sex." says Mark Snyder, Director of Exhibitions and Co-Curator of "Universe of Desire." The exhibition explores this very question by examining what we actually search for on the internet and what we leave behind.
Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, authors of the best-selling book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, provide much of the inspiration for "Universe of Desire." Ogas and Gaddam gathered and coded 400 million internet searches, 55 million of which (or roughly 13 percent) proved to be searches for some kind of erotic content. The findings mined from analyzing the internet habits of tens of millions of people worldwide will be on display in "Universe of Desire."
These anonymous searches bring to question our identity by revealing both the expected "kinks" and "squicks" (squirm-inducing kinks), as well as the broad categories of shared desire that account for 80 percent of internet searches, including "cheating partners", "youth", "mature" and various genitalia. Confronted with this research we begin to see just how similar and different we all are as humans.
Supporting this content is a variety of media that amplifies and humanizes the scientific findings of A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Showcasing artifacts from Science, Culture, Art and Technology, Universe of Desire explores the virtual cataloging of our sexual wants, infatuations and yearnings by walking patrons through the kind of sex we, as humans, look up on the internet.
Photographer Natacha Merritt, author of Digital Diaries, has documented herself digitally for the last 14 years. As one of the first photographers to capture erotic imagery in a digital medium, a selection of this pioneering artist's work is exhibited for the first time in its chronology, offering a visual timeline as example of photographic evolution, serving both as record and expression of our sexual desires through the last decade.
Further exploring the relationship between digital imagery and sexual fantasy, visitors to "Universe of Desire" are invited to engage with a series of video and interactive experiences. Highlights include a digital mirror created by Kevin Bleich and Gabriela Guti�rrez which literally deconstructs patrons into pixels, and projects avatars of their "digital selves" onto the walls of the gallery, while an interactive video collage from Johnny Woods lures visitors into a virtual romp of sexual artifacts designed to stimulate, provoke and delight audiences.

Between 1889 and 1903, New York socialite Peter Marie (1825-1903) commissioned portrait miniatures of women whom he believed epitomized female beauty. His collection of nearly 300 watercolor-on-ivory miniatures stands today as a vivid document of New York�s Gilded Age aristocracy. Beauties of the Gilded Age presents likenesses of many prominent women of the era, including legendary socialite Edith Minturn, athlete Edith Hope Goddard, and social activist Emeline Winthrop. The fragile and rarely exhibited portraits will be displayed in four-month rotations in a special new gallery designed for intimate viewing.

This exhibition includes a selection of early and mid-sixteenth century drawings and prints by Renaissance artists for whom ancient sculpture remained a perpetual source of inspiration. The selection reveals some of the ways in which draftsmen and printmakers from different parts of Europe responded to the common heritage of classical antiquity. Also on display is an exceptional group of prints after designs by Frans Floris de Vriendt (1519/20-1570), the foremost Netherlandish artist of the mid-sixteenth century. They showcase Floris's innovative treatment of mythology and history.

The US federal government was born of a fiscal crisis produced by the inability of the national and state governments to repay the heavy debts incurred winning independence from England. By luck, pluck and a sprinkling of genius, the new nation averted disaster and soon became one of the most creditworthy in history, able to fund global wars, massive territorial acquisitions and scientific and engineering feats of historic importance and unprecedented scale.
Today, however, serious fiscal crisis looms again. The causes and consequences of the current economic crisis are hotly debated, but almost everyone agrees there is no easy fix at hand. Simply put, it has become too difficult to increase taxes or reduce expenditures, and solutions acceptable to both major political parties are in short supply. But the government has faced similar impasses in the past and has managed, with firm leadership, to persevere.
This exhibit brings attention to the budget issues that faced five of our greatest Presidents: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It details how they handled those issues, sometimes with spectacular success and other times with controversial or mixed results. The exhibit also shows how each President's life experiences, including personal wealth, may have influenced decisions on important issues like the rate and type of taxation and the acceptable extent of government borrowing. In and of itself, knowledge of the past cannot improve the future, but retracing past glories and disappointments is often the best place to start.

For centuries, spiders have inspired storytellers, from Ovid to E. B. White to the creators of the eponymous superhero, but their actual role in diverse ecosystems around the globe is just as captivating. Spiders Alive! immerses visitors in the fascinating and complex world of spiders, among the most versatile animals on the planet: they inhabit every continent but Antarctica and are able to survive in environments that range from deserts to rainforests to crowded cities. Spiders are also important predators. By one estimate, the spiders on one acre of woodland alone consume more than 80 pounds of insects a year. Scientists have identified over 42,000 species of spiders to date, and there are at least as many more to be discovered.
Among the live spiders visitors will encounter in this exhibition are the goliath bird eater, one of the largest spiders in the world, whose prey includes snakes, mice, and frogs; the venomous western black widow, one of the few North American spiders harmful to people; and species from other arachnid orders, including African whip spiders, whose whip-like feelers, up to 10 inches in length, help the animal find its way.
Spiders Alive! will explore spiders' silk, venom, and little-known defensive mechanisms such as mimicry and noise making. The exhibition will also include larger-than-life models, videos, interactive exhibits, and fossils, and Museum staff will be handling live arachnids for visitors to see up close. Gallery 77, first floor

Perhaps more than any other 20th-century painter, Vasily Kandinsky (b. 1866, Moscow; d. 1944, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) has been closely linked to the history of the Guggenheim Museum. Hilla Rebay?artist, art advisor, and the museum's first director?promoted nonobjective painting above all other forms of abstraction. She was particularly inspired by the work and writing of Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstraction, who believed that the task of the painter was to convey his own inner world, rather than imitate the natural world. The museum's holdings have grown to include more than 150 works by Kandinsky, and focused exhibitions of his works are presented in the Kandinsky Gallery on Annex Level 3. The current installation, Kandinsky 1911?1913, highlights paintings completed at the moment the artist made great strides toward complete abstraction and published his aesthetic treatise, On the Spiritual in Art (1911, though dated 1912). Also featured are paintings by Robert Delaunay and Franz Marc that were exhibited alongside the work of Kandinsky and others in the landmark 1912 Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) exhibition held at the Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich.

Masterworks: Jewels of the Collection displays some of the museum's most stunning works of art. The stylistic diversity and relationships between various strands of Himalayan and neighboring cultural and artistic traditions are represented by important works of art spanning a period of over one thousand years. In addition to a wide range of Buddhist and Hindu deities rendered in all major media, Masterworks also highlights the museum's most notable recent acquisitions, all of which have rarely or never been exhibited.
Life-size facsimiles of an entire sequence of murals from the Lukhang, the Dalai Lamas' Secret Temple near the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, provide an exceptional opportunity for viewing Himalayan art at its most lavish. The original eighteenth-century wall paintings--inaccessible to the public until the late twentieth century--uniquely depict the most esoteric of meditation and yoga practices in vivid color and detail. Created with new photographic methods by Thomas Laird and Clint Clemens, this display of large-format, high resolution pigment prints allows for even better access to the paintings than is possible in the temple itself. Their presentation at the Rubin marks the first showing in the world of prints created using this technology and also provides the first-ever opportunity outside Tibet to view full-size Tibetan murals in their relationship to portable art from the region.

A new exhibition held in conjunction with the 125th anniversary
of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty.
Known for more than a century as the author of the lines "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...," the poet Emma Lazarus gave voice to the Statue of Liberty and generations of newcomers to America. However, few people know her fascinating story, her Sephardic background, her American roots, and her work for Jewish causes and a Jewish homeland. Learn how Emma Lazarus' journey inspired her to craft an enduring message on exile, refuge, and the promise of America.

The perpetually dark deep ocean comprises the vast majority of the planet's habitable environments where approximately 90 percent of the organisms are bioluminescent and provide the only source of light. Many of these environments are threatened habitats where organisms are in danger of disappearing, some before they have been discovered and studied. Creatures of Light introduces visitors to the astonishing variety of bioluminescent creatures; explores the different ways in which organisms glow, as well as explains the physics and chemistry of natural light; reveals how the ability to glow can be advantageous; and considers how scientists study -- and use -- bioluminescence.
Visitors enter the exhibition through a forest of bioluminescent mushrooms surrounding a large-scale mushroom at the center. One section evokes a New England meadow on a summer night and highlights how fireflies use patterns of flashing light to communicate and attract mates; another invites visitors to peer into Waitomo Cave of New Zealand and learn how glowworms attract prey. The exhibition includes live flashlight fish that harbor bioluminescent bacteria.
Creatures of Light also features an interactive environment that introduces visitors to the brilliant light displays of Mosquito Bay in Vieques, Puerto Rico, where high concentrations of microscopic dinoflagellates, a type of plankton, create a glowing, luminescent halo around anything that moves through the bay; and a large interactive image of the Bloody Bay coral wall in the Cayman Islands. A "deep sea theater" reveals the amazing diversity of living light that marine biologists have captured on camera including anglerfishes waving bioluminescent "lures" to attract prey and jellyfishes that light up like a flashing pinwheel when threatened.

Stone carving is one of the oldest arts in China, its beginnings dating back to remote antiquity. Although jade, the mineral nephrite, was held in the highest esteem, all stones that could achieve a luster after polishing, be it agate, turquoise, malachite, chalcedony, quartz, jasper, or lapis lazuli, were also appreciated. Stone carving experienced an efflorescence during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), when an abundant supply of raw materials, exceptionally accomplished craftsmen, a